Donald Trump's Star of David Hillary Clinton Meme Was Created by White Supremacists

Donald Trump tweeted a meme Saturday that used dog-whistle anti-Semitism to announce that his political rival, "Crooked Hillary," had "made history."

The meme Trump tweeted prominently featured the Star of David, a holy symbol of the Jewish religion that Nazis attempted to pervert by forcing Jews over the age of 6 to sew it onto their clothing during Hitler's reign.

Emblazoned onto the Star of David in Trump's meme are the words "Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!"

Mic discovered Sunday that Donald Trump's Twitter account wasn't the first place the meme appeared. The image was previously featured on 8chan's /pol/ — an Internet message board for the alt-right, a digital movement of neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white supremacists newly emboldened by the success of Trump's rhetoric — as early as June 22, over a week before Trump's team tweeted it.

Though the thread where the meme was featured no longer exists, you can find it by searching the URL in Archive.is, a "time capsule of the internet" that saves unalterable text and graphic of webpages. Doing so allows you to see the thread on /pol/ as it originally existed.

Of note is the file name of the photo, HillHistory.jpg, potentially a nod to the Neo-Nazi code for "HH," or "Heil Hitler," which the alt-right is fond of hiding in plain sight.

The watermark on the lower-left corner of the image leads to a Twitter account that regularly tweets violent, racist memes commenting on the state of geopolitical politics.

And here is that image of the Jewish journalist with the enlarged nose as it originally appeared on @FishBoneHead1's Twitter:

Dan Scavino, the Trump Campaign's social media director, issued a statement late Monday saying "the social media graphic used this weekend was not created by the campaign nor was it sourced from an anti-Semitic site. It was lifted from an anti-Hillary Twitter user where countless images appear."

@DanScavino, Trump's director of social media, releases this statement saying that he lifted image from Twitter:pic.twitter.com/QHr90a5N3J

But rather than laying this controversy to bed, Scavino's explanation for where the Trump team "lifted" the image begs further questioning. When Trump's team sources memes, images and other media from Twitter, the team has a longstanding pattern of always attributing the account from which they found it, no matter how big or small that account may be.

"@brazosboys: Hillary read "sigh" off the Teleprompter, She's so fake she has to be told how to feel: https://youtu.be/iYUQtxXZPsk @FoxNews

For contrast, here, again, is the screenshot of the deleted Trump tweet containing the offending of image of Hillary and the Star of David.

In this particular instance, not only does the Trump account fail to attribute the @FishboneHead1 account — or mention any other Twitter account, for that matter — but whoever superimposed the "Fox News Poll" banner over the lower-left corner of the image completely obscured @FishboneHead1's watermark, thereby further obfuscating the origin of the image.

If, as Scavino claims, Trump's team really did find the controversial meme from Twitter — and not from /pol/, or another digital repository for racist, xenophobic and violent imagery like it — it is unclear why the Trump campaign would choose this particular instance not to attribute the account from which they found it, rupturing from their longstanding attribution practice just when the campaign would seem to need it most.

Mic previously reported white supremacists rally on the internet to track and expose what they believe to be a vast anti-white conspiracy, centuries old, in which Jews have paid off politicians and infiltrated the media to undermine Western society from the top down. The Clinton meme Trump tweeted — which previously appeared on perhaps the biggest bastion of the anti-Semitic alt-right — has brought that same hateful paranoia into the mainstream.

One relationship of particular importance to their "anti-White conspiracy" is that between Jewish reporters and Hillary Clinton, whom they believe to be working in tandem to undermine the Western world, preventing nations like the U.S. from becoming more like their vision of utopia — a nation with racial purity among its core values.

In November, Trump retweeted a meme perpetuating the racist lie that black people committed more violent crimes against white people than any other race. That image was found to have originated from a white supremacist's account as well.

Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff's Star, or plain star!

His claim that the star in the offending image is a Sheriff's Star echoes the statement from former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who argued the previous day on CNN, where Lewandowski now works, that "this is a simple star... the same star that sheriff's departments across the country use all over the place to represent law enforcement."

Though Trump's tweet on Monday explaining the star used almost the exact same wording as Lewandowski's statement on CNN Sunday, the two currently have no official professional relationship. The Trump campaign ousted Lewandowski as its campaign manager in June. He joined CNN as a political commentator just three days later.

Later on Monday, the Trump team released yet another denial of the offending image's anti-Semitism, this time arguing that Clinton's team is "trying to divert attention from the dishonest behavior of herself and her husband."

@realDonaldTrump statement on @HillaryClinton Star of David meme. Original @mic story here: https://mic.com/articles/147711/donald-trump-s-star-of-david-hillary-clinton-meme-was-created-by-white-supremacists#.6Cc5ELBZ4 ...pic.twitter.com/Z0KvKr9MWc

Hilary Clinton's campaign on Monday responded to the meme, calling it "a blatantly anti-Semetic image from racist websites," and adding that it's "part of a pattern that should give voters major cause for concern."

@HillaryClinton statement on that Trump tweet from Saturday which featured, then didn't, a six point star:pic.twitter.com/E5Com0Ezam

Mic has reached out to the Trump campaign to ask why it chose this instance to break routine by not crediting the offending Star of David image to the Twitter account from which they claim to have found it. Mic also inquired as to whether anyone on the campaign altered the image as it had previously appeared on both /pol/ and Twitter in order to obscure @FishboneHead1's watermark in the lower-left corner of the meme. We will update when we hear back.

Anthony Smith is Editorial Director of News for Mic. He was previously Director of Social Media and Analytics for the International Business Times and Digital Strategist for IBT/Newsweek. He attended Wesleyan University and lives in Brooklyn.